Seattle TFA Alum Speaks

A Seattle teacher, and TFA Alum wrote this last November. In it he urges caution in hiring TFA teachers instead of licensed, teachers.

Seattle Public Schools should avoid 'Teach for Awhile' program

The Seattle School Board is considering whether to bring the Teach for America program to Seattle. Guest columnist Jesse Hagopian, a former TFA teacher, cautions the board to invest in experienced teachers rather than recruits from a program that has become known as "Teach for Awhile."

By Jesse Hagopian

FROM 2001 to 2003, I "taught for America."

After graduating from college, I headed for the Bronx, N.Y., where I underwent Teach for America's (TFA) "teacher boot camp." With just five sleepless weeks of on-the-job training teaching summer school to fourth-graders, team meetings and night classes, I was given the stamp of approval and shipped off to Washington, D.C.

The Seattle School Board is expected to vote Wednesday whether to bring TFA to our school district, and before they decide, they should consider the lessons of my experience.

At 21, I found myself in a public elementary school in the ghetto of South East Washington, D.C. — in a classroom with a hole in the ceiling that caused my room to flood, destroying the first American history project I ever assigned the students.

One lasting memory came on my third day of teaching sixth grade.

I had asked the students to bring a meaningful object from home for a show-and-tell activity. We gathered in a circle and the kids sat eagerly waiting to share their mementos. One after another, each and every hand came out of those crumpled brown lunch sacks, clutching a photo of a close family member — usually a dad or an uncle — who was either dead or in jail.

By the time it was my turn, all I could do was stare stupidly at the baseball I pulled out and pick nervously at the red stitches.

Working in the "other America" was a personally powerful experience and made me decide to dedicate my life to finding a solution to transform public education and the broader society that would allow such neglect to occur.

But while TFA allowed me this window into the problems of our country, it didn't prepare me to address these challenges. With only five weeks of training, it wasn't just that I was not equipped to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of students with a wide range of ability levels, create portfolios that accurately assessed student progress, or cultivate qualities of civic courage — it was that I didn't even know that these things were indispensable components of an effective education.

As well, TFA often overemphasizes the importance of test scores, driving corps members to narrow the curriculum to what's on the test to prove that they are effective teachers. Yet even by this measure, TFA-ers don't make the grade.

Consider a six-year study of TFA out of Stanford University that looked at more than 4,000 teachers and 132,000 students on six different tests and found not one case where TFA educators performed as well as certified teachers.

Moreover, TFA's own statistics show that a mere 33 percent continue teaching after their two-year commitment — creating high turnover in the very schools that most need the continuity and stability.

Seattle has an abundance of teachers with teaching certificates and master's degrees struggling to get a teaching position in the local public schools — West Seattle Elementary School, a target school for TFA, had some 800 applicants for a single job. Why bring in undertrained TFA recruits when we have so many young teachers in Seattle who have spent years developing their skills?

TFA is being presented as a solution to the problems in our public schools. But the reality is, in this era of cash-strapped school districts, officials are lured not by the quality of TFA-ers but by the fact that young teachers who leave the district and make room for more young teachers provide an inexpensive alternative to investing in more experienced teachers who will earn a higher salary.

Yet, if the Seattle school district truly wants "excellence for all," it will need highly trained teachers who have a lasting commitment to the profession — not the revolving door that has come to be known as "Teach for Awhile."

Jesse Hagopian teaches history at Garfield High School and is a founding member of the Social Equality Educators (SEE).

Crisis for Seattle Teachers

Seattle Public Schools have seen some hard times this past year...here's an article, Do We Respect Seattle Teachers?, which lists some of the issues. It starts with...

Seattle’s public schools sure have been through a lot in the 2010-2011 school year. On top of the multimillion dollar scandals and the firing of superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, we saw funding cuts from the legislature that has decimated our classroom teachers and classroom supports and caused serious overcrowding at Garfield High School and other schools, which meant that some students had to go without teachers or classrooms for part of the year. At Lowell, overcrowding has brought a need for more classrooms, and I have heard that the district plans to take away space from developmental preschool and toileting facilities.

There's a school in the district in which students had to go "part of the year" without teachers or classrooms? This is how the public -- in the form of the legislature -- supports public education? Are there public funds going to charters or private schools? If so, why is money being funded away from the public schools if they need it? This is just flat out wrong, in my opinion. Why aren't the people up in arms?

Here are some other things which have happened in Seattle this year:

• Ex-superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson tried to ram through a proposal to tie teacher evaluations to the results of standardized tests – a measure that would increase “teaching to the test.”
• The state legislature tried to pass law after law that would erode seniority, even though teachers improve greatly over the first five years of teaching, and most especially in their first year.
• The district laid off teachers, even though we will see an increase in enrollment next year.
• The district also signed a deal with Teach for America to bring in teachers with five weeks of training to address “shortages,” despite the fact that there were 18,668 applications for 766 positions last year.

Yes...they're laying off teachers in Seattle and then filling classrooms with TFA bodies.

When the public schools "fail" because the state has "failed" to support them who will get blamed? Are the legislators interested in the students, or just crushing public education and public educators?

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SAVE OUR SCHOOLS MARCH AND NATIONAL CALL TO ACTION

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More Hypocrisy

One of the basic tenets spouted by the corporate "reformers" and their politician friends is that bad teachers are ruining American public education. Newsweek has featured "bad teachers" on its cover. The movie Waiting for Superman blames bad teachers and the teachers unions for everything.

Where are all these bad teachers coming from? The answer to that seems to be that they come from greed. The conventional wisdom, at least in the Governor's mansions and state houses in places like Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio, is that teachers are so greedy that they will spend years in the classroom simply to get their high wages and retirement pensions.

Arne Duncan has indicated that teaching experience doesn't matter and people like Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates seem to believe that the older you are, and the more teaching you have done, the less qualified you are to remain in the classroom.

How do the Duncan's, Rhee's and state politicians propose to find "good" teachers? The answer it's clear, is to recruit them for Teach for America.

That's just what's happening at the University of Washington.

Students in the Master's program at the University's College of Education, who must spend years getting training, experience in classrooms, and pedagogical background in education before they're allowed to teach, are now being told that they must compete for jobs with Teach for America candidates who are being given teaching credentials after just a few weeks of training.

In a must-read post titled Plan to host Teach for America at Univ. of Washington highlights hypocrisy of ed reform Parents Across America notes that,

Here they have been spending two years following the rigorous standards the dean ostensibly believes in, diligently studying the art and science of teaching, paying their own way for a $23,000 ($50,000 nonresident) masters degree at what they thought was a reputable teaching institution. They are spending hours of in-class time in actual public school classrooms getting invaluable experience, all in the hopes of applying for one of the rare teaching positions in the fall. Now they are being told that a stream of fresh grads will be brought in alongside them at U.W., given a special, condensed education, will do little to no student teaching, but will compete against them for the same jobs.

Furthermore, Bill Gates has offered to pay the $4000 fee for the TFAers.

It turns out that there is a connection between Teach for America and the University of Washington's new Dean of the College of Education, Tom Stritikus. Stritikus is a Teach for America alumnus and is making things easy for TFA to move into position in Seattle.

The Save Seattle Schools Community Blog reported on a series of communications between Dean Stritikus and TFA:

The day before [Stritikus'] appointment was even announced (August 18th), he contacted Wendy Kopp, the head of TFA. He asks her if she wants to build an on-line endorsement program for TFA with UW and to do press for him. She replies, “As you say, this is a terrific moment in the history of TFA and hopefully is a just a harbinger of all that’s to come in terms of the influence of alumni on teacher education.”

Further on in the e-mail, she says, “Let’s absolutely see what we can cook up in terms of ways of working together…”

Just one week later, he is tries to get together with TFA staff in Washington, D.C. He says, “I would love to be able to get a set of possible ideas for collaboration on the table and identify priorities.”

Also that week, he says, “I offered to help Janis in anyway she needed.” Janis is Janis Ortega, the TFA director for Puget Sound.

In an e-mail on Sep 13, 2010, again just weeks after he became Dean, Stritikus writes to a TFA official and says, “By that time (9/29-10/1), I will have talked to key faculty, developed a sketch plan for the master’s degree, and gotten a handle on the certification issues.”

Naturally the students at the College of Education are upset. They are spending thousands of dollars and years of their lives training for careers in education.

One student referred to the UW-TFA deal as a “slap in the face.” You can’t blame them for feeling betrayed by Stritikus and the university...

It must feel like running a 10-mile race, only to have the judges allow a group of new runners join in the last 100 yards and race you to the finish — on skateboards.

Is it really bad teachers? Can you make better teachers by replacing education students who spend years studying for their careers with recent graduates who get 5 weeks of training?

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SAVE OUR SCHOOLS MARCH AND NATIONAL CALL TO ACTION

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